Presidential Lectures

In this lecture, James Wray will describe his team’s efforts to characterize not only the where and the when of water on Mars, but also “how long,” “how warm” and “what was the chemistry?” Incorporating the latest results from both orbital imaging and surface roving, he will describe how these questions — and their preliminary answers — have sharpened our focus in planning the next missions to the Red Planet. Those missions will directly seek the signs of life on ancient Mars and potentially ferry life from Earth to a second home on Mars. These two near-future goals are both synergistic and conflicting, as the talk will discuss.

In this lecture, Leonardo Rastelli will overview the bootstrap approach, the idea that theory space can be determined from the general principles of symmetry and quantum mechanics. This strategy provides a new unifying language for QFT and has allowed researchers to make predictions for physical observables even in strongly coupled theories. Rastelli will illustrate the general framework in a few examples, ranging from the concrete (boiling water) to the abstract (supersymmetric theories in various spacetime dimensions).

In this lecture, Paola Arlotta will focus on the cerebral cortex and present the challenges and opportunities of modeling human brain development using pluripotent stem cells within 3D human brain organoids. Building on developmental work in mice, such organoids promise a better understanding of complex neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism spectrum disorder. She will discuss her recent work on the generation and long-term development of human brain organoids and the study of their developmental trajectories, cellular diversities and neuronal network features.